Data context

Off and on for a handful of years I’ve been working on a list of all of the buildings constructed in 1890. The Seattle P-I published the list on January 1, 1891, celebrating the city’s rebirth after the Great Fire. It’s an amazing snapshot, but the building locations are nonsensical because almost all of Seattle’s streets were renamed in the years following the Great Fire.

To determine where they were I created spreadsheets of a series of ordinances that renamed the city. For areas without ordinances to be found, I looked through a variety of 1880s to 1910s maps to determine old and new street names. I also published all of that data as csv files to figshare for free use, and I’ve posted them to my website as lookup tables for quick searching.

Find links to all of the neighborhoods at the bottom of this page. This time I cover Green Lake. Later there will be more.

The Green Lake context

Just 25 buildings were built in Green Lake in 1890, but it’s still a missing neighborhood in my effort to pinpoint the current spot for all homes, barns, and brick buildings constructed in Seattle in 1890.

Green Lake’s earliest plats date from 1888, just before Seattle’s Great Fire. A handful of land owners worked together to build a streetcar line and sell their land in parcels to prospective homeowners. By 1890 the east and south side of the lake were laid out and up for sale. With each plat came a set of new street names.

I don’t know exactly when the names changed, but by the end of the 1890s Green Lake’s street grid was just about how we know it today. Green Lake was annexed into Seattle in 1891 along with other communities north of the water barrier of Lake Union, Queen Anne, and Montlake.

All of the streets of Seattle south of what we now call the ship canal and Fremont cut were renamed by an ordinance in 1895. Smaller ordinances changed names just prior and after that. I have not found such an ordinance for Green Lake, or the other 1891 annexed communities. I don’t know if that means another method was used to change Green Lake’s street names, or if it just had a different syntax of ordinance title that escapes my discovery.

Wonky streets

If you’ve been there, you know the streets are wonky in Green Lake. When you see that, you can be pretty sure that something weird was going on in the heads of the people that laid out the maps, and weird things have happened since.

Two things have stood out to me so far. First is Wallingford’s Division of the Green Lake Addition. Wallingford made his plat a Civil War Union memorial. The names were Lincoln (Wallingford), Sheridan (N 54th), Thomas (N 53rd), Sherman (N 52nd) and Grant (N 51st). He also included Harrison (Woodlawn), named after the president in 1889 when the plat was filed.

Second is Kilbourne’s div of Green Lake. The Kilbournes knew they kouldn’t keep knaming streets with Ks, but they tried anyways. The off-kilter streets Kensington, Kirkwood, Keystone, and Kenwood all came from Kilbourne. They also had cross streets Kenosia (N 60th), Kenilworth (59th), Kennebeck (58th), and Kimball (56th).

Today our tiny Kenwood Place starts at the lake and runs southeast to N 55th. It was created as Kenwood Boulevard though, which was east-west (57th) from the edge of their plat to Kirkwood, then bent north (still 57th now), then bent north again to the lake (the north half of current Kenwood Place). It was platted at 80 feet, while surrounding streets were 60 or 66.

Kenwood Place must be the biggest tiny street in Seattle!

If you look at the aerial map, Kenwood Place now has inexplicably massive intersections with Woodlawn and McKinley — these are all back roads. And the houses from East Green Lake Way to 57th are set waaay back from the street. That’s because it was supposed to be a boulevard entrance to the neighborhood. It was supposed to be like Ravenna is today.

Something that happened later is a bit surprising too. Ladd Ave in Wood’s South Shore became the narrow half of Kenwood Place. But then the section of N 56th between Keystone and Kensington — which had been named Kimball — was renamed Ladd for some period of time.

Similarly, Wallingford’s Lincoln Ave became Wallingford Ave, but also the section of N 52nd between Keystone and Kensington — which was named Sherman — for some time was called Lincoln. I don’t understand why they shifted these street names over to connecting streets.

Along the way I stumbled on a cool voting district map from 1891. Green Lake was annexed in the middle of the year, so they added in all of the streets, but for some reason had to literally pencil in the street names. Maybe they ran out of time? In Wood’s South Shore (up and left of the “9”), the streets are penciled in as well.

Wallingford’s Park

Wallingford’s Park Division of Green Lake is interesting and tragic. It’s a very early Green Lake plat.

Since it was filed in November 1889 we need to think of both streetcar-inspired demand for remote single family homes, and the demand created by displaced Pioneer Square residents from the Great Fire and the people that flooded the city as it rebuilt.

Two things make it interesting to me. First, Wallingford named two short streets after his wife Arabella and his daughter Emma though neither street exists now. Coincidentally, my great, great grandfather Fred Stroud worked for Wallingford and my gg grandmother was Arabella Stroud, sharing the name of his employer’s wife.

The streets were removed separately. First Arabella Place was removed in a replat of the northeast corner of the addition. The curved streets of the addition needed to be reworked to match Hutchinson’s Division to the north. Removed by 1912. Then Emma Place was erased in the creation of Interstate 5.

Interstate 5 also completely erased the second interesting part of the plat. Wallingford had many curving streets in his small addition, and at the soft corners he put in a fan-like spread of wedge shaped lots. 1936 aerial photos show that many of these were combined for large lots, but in particular the fan on the north corner of the intersection of Maple Leaf Pl, Emma Pl, NE 74th St, and 9th Ave NE (removed for I-5) still had most of the fan intact.

The neighborhoods on either side of I-5 do have many off-kilter streets, but there’s nothing like the rolling streets of Wallingford’s Park Division. East Green Lake Way and Woodlawn curve, but to match the shoreline of the lake.